Editorials
How ‘The Persistence’ Uses Procedural Generation To Keep Its Horror Fresh
It’s a reasonable assumption to make that even some of the best horror films lose a little of their luster after the third or fourth viewing. Don’t get me wrong, the classics are just that – classics, but nothing can replicate the chills, the unsettling first-time frights or the rush of adrenaline that you get when experiencing those movies for the very first time.
As much as their silver-screen counterparts, horror efforts in the gaming realm can also too, find themselves similarly afflicted in this way, with the numerous jump scares and gore stuffed cut-cutscenes ascribing to the law of diminishing returns with every subsequent viewing. After all, there are only so many times you can take the head of the Baker family crashing through the walls at you in Resident Evil 7 before you kinda get a little numb to it all.
For me that’s quite a lot – for others, however, your mileage may vary.
Enter then The Persistence, a sterling first-person shooter effort for PSVR from British developer Firesprite, the game aims to disrupt the status quo a bit more than its contemporaries seem willing to. As the clone of a security officer on a ship that finds itself generously stuffed with a number of Event Horizon 2.0 style aberrations to avoid, the emphasis in The Persistence is very much on stealth and by proxy, not getting pounded into a fine red mist by said monstrosities.
Where The Persistence meaningfully differs itself from its genre peers, however, is in how it leverages procedural generation to keep its level layouts fresh. Every time you start a new playthrough, the ship’s structure rearranges its numerous deck modules into a random configuration which in turn has a direct impact on how to approach each attempt at the game.
Open plan areas in a previous playthrough that may have permitted wide creative latitude for concealment might well find themselves replaced by tighter affairs, where such opportunities for stealth are limited. Likewise, the numerous monsters that you’ll encounter throughout the ship also find themselves similarly shuffled around the place too – where there could have been a trivial foe on a previous playthrough, might now be supplanted by an indomitable enemy that completely changes your tactics and approach to the situation at hand.
10 Horror Games to Play on PSVR Right Now
By embracing such mercurial design principles, The Persistence keeps not just the challenge fresh but the fear and the horror unfaded too – a miracle of sorts that more developers in this genre space should take notice of going forward. In The Persistence, every corner potentially holds some fresh terror, while the comforts of previously discovered safe areas to retreat to no longer exist.
With each playthrough the terror is reimagined anew and so too with it does that familiar fraying of the nerves and the pumping of adrenaline emerge start once again. Exacerbating the effect further is the fact that The Persistence is played out entirely within the realms of VR, meaning that each and every fright and pointedly, the anticipation of them, is far more keenly affecting than your underwear might like them to be.
In essence, procedural generation would seem to be a robust and evocative way to ensure that games which trade on horror, terror and fearful thrills can continue to do so for far longer than they would be otherwise able to. Tantalizingly, if one were to expand the concept beyond the boundaries of The Persistence, an already superbly judged hybrid of Dead Space and Alien Isolation, the mind boggles at how other entries in the genre might well benefit from the inclusion of such design.
Certainly, a version of the previously mentioned Alien Isolation which might include procedurally generated content would be a grandly pant-filling affair – albeit one that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense when viewed within that game’s rigid narrative framework. Equally though, a Resident Evil title in the style of Resident Evil 7 with shifting map layouts and randomized enemy design could also succeed as well.
Like that force thing from Star Wars, however, there must be balance. While procedural generation is great at randomizing level design, monster types, locations and so on, overdoing it can result in a deeply impersonal experience. Worse still, this results in the realization that the game isn’t properly catering for the player or their feelings, which when you’re dealing with notions of horror and terror that literally feed off your own personal experience, is really quite the opposite of what you want as a player and a narrative participant.
In The Persistence, however, this is the never the case simply because its procedural design beats operate within a very well defined set of deftly considered parameters, ensuring that the constant sense of unease and the spectacle of its unrelenting terror are never diminished.
So yeah, more of this please developers.
“Elevated Horror.” Of all the combinations in the English language, that one is the most insufferable.
It represents almost a decade of scary movies that, for the most part, took themselves too seriously. Horror responds to the moment, so its “why so serious” lean makes sense as we scuttle through the “worst of times” equation of Charles Dickens’ famous opening lines. But there’s still an opening and a need for a lighter approach; one that not only has fun with its audience but takes the piss out of a genre that is seemingly letting its newfound “respectability” go to its head.
Wes Craven believed devotees see horror films to let out their fears one primal scream at a time. At their core, these movies are roller coasters; they bring us as close to the edge as possible before pulling us back into a safety net of reality. The need for a bigger and badder coaster increases during times when the size of that net decreases.
There’s a thrill that comes from imagining being in a foot race with a madman, or outthinking the hordes of zombies on the other side of the door, plus the scavenger humans coming behind them. There’s even a rush that comes from imagining how one might deal with possession to see good triumph over evil in the end. It’s all about building tension and releasing it through catharsis. That cathartic release usually sounds like screams followed by laughter, which signals relief. Genre heavy hitters over the past 10 years offered very little of that respite when the credits rolled. Films like Hereditary, The Witch, Talk to Me, and even Smile (pick one) keep that tension going after the screen fades to black.
Hereditary
As the genre became obsessed with creating trauma metaphors, that lack of release made sense. Anyone with even a small sample size of traumatic experiences knows those emotions don’t magically resolve themselves in an allotted run time. But how much trauma can one take? Especially when there’s a mess going on outside that few of us can escape from. Movies offer that off-ramp, no matter how short.
Everything can’t be, nor should it be, “elevated.” Audiences need thoughtful explorations of life’s ills via monsters as much as they need murdering masked maniacs with kitchen knives. And no, it doesn’t have to go any deeper than that. Sometimes, a knife is just a knife, and it’s still worth our time and respect. As weird as it sounds, that simplicity is comforting not in spite of the trauma but because of it.
The worst of times should manifest more than just anguish. People need to laugh just as much as they need to think seriously about this moment in time. Even the Scream franchise forgot the meta rock upon which it built its church when the latest foray sacrificed the subtle comedy for serious drama. Scary Movie returned at the perfect moment. It provides the necessary laughs, but it’s not a cure-all.
This isn’t a call for Scary Movie imitators but a return to a mainstream landscape where Killer Klowns from Outer Space sat with The Serpent and the Rainbow, nestled neatly with the latest Nightmare on Elm Street, which took nothing away from The Vanishing.
They Live
Even They Live, John Carpenter’s horror sci-fi satire sandwich, kept its tongue firmly in cheek while discussing serious ideas still relevant in 2026. Yes, a film about aliens taking over the world through subliminal messaging only visible through coded sunglasses is, in fact, a tad silly. Carpenter understood that mainstream horror can’t become so self-important that it never looks itself in the mirror and laughs at that inherent silliness.
The thing is, horror historically excels at poking fun at itself. Most of the Scream franchise, The Cabin in the Woods, or The Blackening show adoration without kowtowing. They recognize tropes and trappings but invert them for an audience already in on the joke, but one that also finds solace in said conventions. This keeps the genre on its toes; once something gets parodied, it’s usually time to evolve. That breeds new ideas and fresh filmmakers, which not only strengthen the genre’s collective voice but also amplify it.
Get Out, as “elevated” as some critics want us to believe it is, is a cathartic, populist scary movie that spoke to an untapped audience rather than speaking down to them. Backrooms is one of the biggest horror hits in years, partially because it’s fine-tuned for modern-day teenagers instead of their parents. Movies like these tell everyone the genre is open for business; open for innovation and, yeah, open for new ways in which people can lovingly poke fun at with a wink and a nudge.
Horror needs dread as much as it needs laughter.
Catharsis is just as important as tension, and pulpy populism has the same merit as more high-brow material. Respectability shouldn’t come at the expense of an experience akin to walking through a haunted house. At a time when joy seems in short supply, horror should look to its past to map out its future, and make things just a tad brighter for audiences.
Backrooms
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